Museum categories profoundly affect scholarly knowledge claims in an A to Z of disciplines, from anthropology to zoology. In the fall semester 2012 I taught a new seminar at the Bard Graduate Center, “Tangible Things: Observing, Collecting, Sorting” in which we examined the formation and uses of nearly fifty methodical collections. In addition, the seminar built its own comprehensive collection in the very same areas of enquiry.

Every week, for ten weeks, the nine students in the seminar and I each brought an item to class. Each thing related to the topic of study that week.…

Emory University recently launched an online archive of Ivan Karp’s (1943–2011) published papers in order to keep his work widely available. Karp was a social anthropologist and a leading scholar of social theory, museum and heritage studies, and African studies. He began his long-term research with Iteso communities in western Kenya in 1969. Karp wrote extensively about power, personhood and agency, about African societies and systems of thought, and he published groundbreaking work about museums and exhibitions.

The new online archive includes complete lists of Karp’s books and of the works published in the two book series for which he served as editor: the African Systems of Thought series at Indiana University Press and the Smithsonian Series in Ethnographic Inquiry at Smithsonian Institution Press.